“Apress rushed this one out. They’ve smelled money and rushed this one out. What a shame.”

It was my first thought when I read Apress had a new book coming out on iPad development called Beginning iPad Development for iPhone Developers – Mastering the iPad SDK.

I was wrong.

After my review of “Learn Cocoa on the Mac”, I got in touch with one of the authors – Jack Nutting – who told me I could get a free copy of this new book as a thank you. Since then, we’ve had few mails going back and forth and Jack feels like a friend I haven’t met yet. If you’re reading this, Jack, I very much look forward to meeting you for a few drinks and a good chat.

When I got my iPad and started playing with the sdk I focused a lot on the new split view and the popovers. I don’t know why, but for me they seemed like the biggest “new thing” on the iPad. I’ve also played with movieplayer controllers a bit while doing some work for a customer but so far, that’s been it on the iPad.

I’ve been spending a lot of time learning more general Cocoa frameworks which work on iPhone, iPad and osx like Core Data and haven’t really studied much of the iPad sdk since.

I really didn’t know what to expect from this book and found it hard to see how an entire book could be filled with iPad specific stuff. There is – of course – a lot of new stuff in the iPad sdk such as bezier paths, creation of pdf files, a new framework called Core Text, Popovers, enhanced movie player controllers, split view controllers, modal presentation styles, new input methods, gesture recognizers, document support and you’ll be happy to hear that this book covers them all.

The book shows most of the new functionalities by building a graphics app called Dudel. As the chapters in the book progress, more and more new features are added to Dudel. I’ve seen this approach in more books and I like it: not only does it give a more practical understanding of new functionality, you also learn how the authors structure their apps. There’s much to be learnt from just that.

Apress continues to deliver quality books for iPhone and iPad development. I’ve been through this book about 3 times now and everytime I find something new. If you have been playing with iPhone development and are considering stepping up to the iPad, then this book will be a _very_ good companion.